When the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts opened its doors, in 1971, the Times’ architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, was not impressed. She described the building’s style as “aggrandized posh” and sniffed that its overlong corridors “would be great for drag racing.” The 2,360-seat Opera House, she wrote, looks like “one of those passe, redpadded drugstore candy‐valentines,” and, on Sunday night, at the forty-eighth Kennedy Center Honors, that’s exactly what it was—a tacky, supersized love letter to the center’s self-installed chairman, President Donald Trump.
Every detail of the ceremony appeared to have been plucked from Trump’s mood board, an indelible blend of revanchist impulses and eighties camp. The Honors medallions, which historically were trimmed in rainbow ribbon and had been made, for forty-seven years, by the Baturin family, in Bethesda, Maryland, were redesigned, by Tiffany & Co., with a navy-blue ribbon purportedly associated with “tradition.” This year’s awardees were the country singer George Strait, the glam-rock band Kiss, the Broadway tenor Michael Crawford—known for his defining role as the Phantom of the Opera—the disco queen Gloria Gaynor, and Sylvester Stallone, of “Rocky” and “Rambo” fame. “We’ve had no group like it,” Trump said, an accurate statement. No previous cohort of Honors talent has so perfectly reflected a single person’s taste.
Also a seeming tribute to Trump: steakhouse salads served in glass cups outside the auditorium; Mar-a-Lago-faced women done up as if “Thank you for your attention to this matter!” were a dress code. (“This matter” being boobs.) Selfie stations were arranged around the Grand Foyer, the backdrops resplendent with crushed roses, cinematic skylines, and guitars. Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, milled about with political figures such as Marco Rubio, Howard Lutnick, Kari Lake, and Sean Duffy. Kellyanne Conway, posed for a photo, draped in emerald gauze. No fewer than nine of the red-carpet-walkers were associated with Paramount Skydance, which recently had a large deal go through Trump’s F.C.C. and is now angling to buy Warner Brothers. (Later this month, the Honors show will be broadcast on CBS, a Paramount-owned network.) “D.C. isn’t as bad as they say it is,” a guest in a wine-red jacket advised his companions.
Compared with the FIFA World Cup draw, which had taken place at the center a few days earlier—a genuinely star-studded affair, during which Trump was awarded a cursed-looking object representing the sports body’s inaugural Peace Prize—the Honors seemed like an afterthought, with what scanned as a preponderance of fresh-faced young politicos talking shop. Fashion-wise, a polished banality and a sensitivity to traditional gender roles prevailed: mermaid waves and clean shaves, furs and flag pins. As we filed into the Opera House, the crystal chandelier, a gift from Austria, twinkled above us. If it crashed to the ground, as in the first act of “The Phantom of the Opera,” would Crawford be suspected? Or D.E.I.?
Perhaps the most radical change to the ceremony this year was that the chairman would be m.c.’ing the proceedings himself. It is a job that plays to Trump’s strengths as an entertainer: charisma, mischief, unpredictability. Entering the building, he teased that “maybe I haven’t prepared” and that “maybe you want to be a little loose.” Soon after he took the stage, he promised to “try to act like Johnny Carson.”
Trump’s in-person-hosting duties were limited to three sets of brief remarks. He largely avoided politics, save for a few asides: “They tried to get Biden to do this”—helm the Honors—he said, adding, “I would have watched!” He revelled in dusting off his real-estate-impresario persona. Earlier in the evening, Trump said, he’d toured the Kennedy Center grounds—he has secured two hundred and fifty-seven million dollars from Congress for physical repairs—and he’d marvelled at the “gorgeous” SyberJet Lounge, previously the Opera House Circles Lounge, which got its new name when the aircraft manufacturer sponsored the red carpet for a Stuttgart Ballet performance at the center, in October. (This was a consolation prize of sorts, after the Alvin Ailey dance company declined to make its annual appearance at the Center.) “The Trump Kennedy Center—” Trump began, and paused. The crowd cheered. “Oops,” he said impishly.
It’s been a year of embarrassment and chaos for the Kennedy Center, a sprawling organization that also houses the National Symphony Orchestra and the Washington National Opera. The cultural hub has served as one of the higher-profile demolition projects of Trump’s second term, ever since Trump posted, on a Friday evening in early February, that he planned to fire the board’s then chairman, David Rubenstein, and other trustees who did not “share our vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture.” By the following Wednesday, Deborah Rutter, who had served as the president of the Kennedy Center for more than a decade, had been dismissed, along with the organization’s general counsel and all of the Biden appointees on the traditionally nonpartisan board. They were replaced with allies of the President’s, including the singer Lee Greenwood; the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham; and Trump’s longtime adviser Dan Scavino. And Trump installed Richard Grenell, a former ambassador to Germany, who briefly served as the head of intelligence during Trump’s first term, as the center’s interim president. “Ric, welcome to show business!” he posted on Truth Social.
Trump’s ostensible reasons for seizing the reins were that the Kennedy Center’s programming had taken a “very wokey” turn, with “Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth,” and that this D.E.I. capitulation had blown a hole in the organization’s finances. “The Kennedy Center learned the hard way that if you go woke, you will go broke,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said at the time. (As The New Yorker reported in April, the center’s revenue had in fact grown steadily under Rutter’s leadership, and its endowment increased by more than fifty per cent.) Grenell’s arrival marked a swing toward the reactionary, and the advent of leadership that’s more fluent in the culture wars than in culture. Listing pronouns in e-mail signatures has been expressly prohibited. In September, the center hosted a prayer vigil for the slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Some Kennedy Center old-timers have dubbed Grenell and his lieutenants, Nick Meade, Rick Loughery, and Nick Canny, “the Icks.” (Grenell is also known as Grendel.)
Employees told me that the new hires “don’t understand the basic vocabulary” of arts administration. They have questions. Things like, what is “capacity”? What is “an arena show”? What is a “backline”? What is “stage left”? What is an “usher”? Perhaps predictably, Trump’s takeover and firing of veteran cultural programmers made the center radioactive to performers. The comedian Issa Rae and the musical “Hamilton” pulled out of their contracts soon after Trump appointed himself chair. Other artists quietly ghosted the arts hub; at least one agreed to perform, but asked not to be named in social media posts.
The center has weathered months of damaging press—reports of plummeting ticket sales, skittish donors, and aggrieved artists waiting for payment. Even as the organization’s reputation has tanked, Grenell has found people to write big checks. For this year’s Honors, he dramatically raised prices for the choicest seats. In a phone call, Grenell said he also supports “niche programming which is not always able to sell tickets,” so long as it can find a deep-pocketed benefactor. (He asked the Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s foundation to underwrite the center’s production of “Parade,” citing the production’s “uplifting” beauty and warnings against antisemitism.) Yet the center’s president is known to be an unreliable chronicler of its fortunes. For example, Grenell flaunted that “The Sound of Music” sold out on its opening night. According to internal sales figures reviewed by The New Yorker, however, it was at fifty-four-per-cent capacity. In general, one staffer told me, “I’d have better results selling shows in the pandemic with half the people dying.”
Under Grenell’s leadership, the Kennedy Center has appeared to transform into a seat of political and interpersonal backscratching. The new president appointed Elliot Berke, his longtime lawyer, as the organization’s general counsel, and Lisa Dale, a former campaign adviser to Kari Lake (Lake’s husband, Jeff Halperin, has also worked for the center, making social media videos), to lead the sixteen-person department, formerly a team of nearly a hundred. The new fund-raising approach is more typical of political campaigns, multiple employees told me—a series of one-and-done, steroidal cash shots, often with the expectation of access in return. Grenell “cares about countries and corporations,” one staffer said. “He doesn’t care about people.”
When Trump appointed Grenell the acting intelligence director during Trump’s first term, Grenell drew criticism for not registering as having advocated on behalf of a foreign power after his public-relations firm, Capitol Media Partners, worked for a foundation funded by autocratic Hungary. (A lawyer for Grenell at the time said he was not required to register.) In October, the Kennedy Center partnered with the Hungarian Embassy on a concert, featuring the violinist Zoltán Mága, that doubled as, in Mága’s words, a celebration “of Hungarian freedom, Christian values, and national pride.” According to an archived version of Grenell’s personal website, his P.R. firm also had clients based in Kazakhstan; Kennedy Center spokesperson, Roma Daravi, revealed last month that the Kazakh government has pledged a donation to the center.
At the end of November, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, announced that the Environment and Public Works Committee would be opening an investigation into Grenell’s leadership. “The Center is being looted to the tune of millions of dollars in foregone revenue, canceled programming, unpaid use of its facilities, and wasteful spending on luxury restaurants and hotels,” Whitehouse wrote. A press release for the investigation called the Kennedy Center “a slush fund and private club for Trump’s friends and political allies.” Grenell disputes these allegations, though it’s undeniable that the center has become overtly MAGA-aligned since he took over. In the past few months, the center has hosted a NewsNation “bipartisan town hall” featuring Chris Cuomo and Tom Homan and a Christian Persecution Summit organized by CPAC, which, according to Whitehouse, paid a sharply reduced rental fee. Documents obtained by Whitehouse suggest that FIFA used the center’s buildings for free, but a spokesperson for Grenell said that the soccer organization donated over two million dollars, in addition to providing five million in “sponsorship opportunities.”
The irony of all of this is that Trump was drawn to the Kennedy Center by its cultural prestige—a resource that his loyalists’ cronyism and self-dealing have grievously depleted. The center has historically relied on “underplays,” in which artists accept much lower rates than they otherwise would in order to perform at a culturally significant venue. Now that the space’s reputation is tarnished, performing talent has less incentive to settle for those smaller fees. And, for all of the Administration’s insistence that being woke made the Kennedy Center broke, there’s little indication that the traditionalist counterprogramming is bringing in ticket sales. A Noël concert that Grenell ardently touted as early as February—“we are doing a big, huge celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas,” he said—is scheduled for December 17th. As of December 8th, it had sold just over three hundred tickets, out of around twenty-three hundred.
At this point, we know what Trump wants to do with the Kennedy Center. As a real-estate developer, he wants to renovate it; as a politician, he wants to assimilate it into his movement. But Trump’s investment in the organization feels deeply personal. Each honoree seemed to represent a different aspect of the President’s idealized self. There was Kiss—a group of rebellious rockers from Queens. Strait, who evokes a romantic notion of the sturdy, unpretentious everyman, a guy who knows how to lasso a bull. As for Gaynor, the President spoke fervently about the inspiration to be found in the “three simple words” of her signature song: “I will survive.” And Stallone, Trump said, his voice heavy with feeling, was “the greatest underdog in cinema.”
Most illuminating of all might be Crawford, whom Kelsey Grammer couldn’t even introduce without breaking into a self-deprecating ditty. (“Hello, Michael,” he sang, to the tune of “Hello, Dolly,” his voice tremulous with incomplete commitment to the bit.) The soprano Laura Osnes, who was ostracized by the Broadway community after the New York Post publicized the fact that she hadn’t been vaccinated for COVID, played Christine, the heroine of “Phantom of the Opera.” Osnes teamed up with David Phelps, a Christian recording artist, for the show’s titular anthem. As the number reached its climax, the Phantom delivered his booming command to “sing, my angel of music!” Christine, the glittering captive, strained her voice higher and higher.
For all his Broadway aspirations, Trump, when he took the stage as the host, didn’t sound like someone whose dream was coming true. His manner was perfunctory, a bit bitter. “Many of you are miserable, horrible people,” Trump told the audience, to laughter. Some of the night’s biggest acts, he said later, “probably don’t like me very much.” Technical snafus occasionally disturbed the proceedings. A couple of times, the house lights came up before a video was over; at one point, in the middle of a speech, crew members started transporting a piano. ♦








